UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine professor receives national award

Friday, June 19, 2009 — Rick Segal, Ph.D., professor and director of the Division of Physical Therapy in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, has been elected as a 2009 Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association, the most prestigious recognition granted by the organization. Segal received the honor at a ceremony in Baltimore recently as part of the association’s annual national conference.

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About 130 of the association’s 65,000 members serve as Worthingham fellows. The fellowship category was established in 1980. Two other UNC faculty have been named Worthingham fellows, Margaret Moore and Michael Gross. “There are many great contributors to the field of physical therapy who are fellows and many that are more deserving than me who have not been elected. Thus, I am very humbled to be a Worthingham fellow,” said Segal.

The fellowship is named for Catherine Worthingham, who served on the APTA’s board intermittently from 1932 to 1965, was APTA president from 1940 to 1944, and was the first physical therapist to earn a doctoral degree. Worthingham passed away in 1997.